Quality function deployment

Quality function deployment, or QFD, is a methodology for transforming customer needs into engineering specifications during product design and development, bridging the gap between qualitative customer demands and quantitative technical requirements by turning the voice of the customer into engineering characteristics for a product. It was developed in Japan beginning in 1966 by Yoji Akao, who combined ideas from quality assurance, quality control and value engineering, describing the method as a way to convert qualitative user demands into quantitative parameters, deploy the functions that form quality, and deploy the methods for achieving that design quality down into subsystems and component parts. Its central tool is the house of quality matrix, which lists customer desires and their importance, lists relevant engineering characteristics, correlates the two, and assigns objectives and priorities to system requirements. The approach can be applied at different levels of a product, from the complete system down to individual components, allowing assessment throughout design and manufacturing. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/